REMAKING TRADITION
By Blake Miller; Photography by Chris Edwards; Styled by Kendra Surface
This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Home Design & Decor’s Triangle edition.
An architectural gem in the heart of Wilmington’s Intracoastal Waterway pays homage to an eighteenth century home.
Mark Batson was captivated. For years, he’d driven past the long, winding gravel drive leading up to the historic home on Shandy Hall, never getting close enough to see it fully. So when he received a call from the home’s owner, Bob Fleury, inviting him to the house to discuss renovating it, the architectural designer jumped at the opportunity. “I’ve lived around the corner from Shandy Hall for years,” says Batson, owner of Tongue & Groove Design + Build. “It’s a special place, and I’m a history major. The chance to work on this house, built in 1737, was very appealing to me.”
Once he walked onto the front porch, though, Batson knew there wasn’t much worth saving. Sitting on 2.3 acres of waterfront land on Bradley Creek along North Carolina’s Intracoastal Waterway, the house is the second oldest home on record in Wilmington. The property was rich with history, having housed generals and military during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, and served as a coastal summer home for wealthy southern families for generations. But a three-hundred-year-old foundation coupled with house fires that decimated much of the original home and multiple renovations over the last century left very little of the original structure intact. Batson spent weeks researching the home’s history and consulted engineers about the soundness of the home’s structure, but, alas, “it was a total teardown,” he says.
Not wanting to dismiss the home’s historical significance, both Fleury and Batson wanted to pay homage to the original structure with the new architectural plans while painstakingly deconstructing the home to salvage any original materials. “I felt an obligation to preserve the history of the home as much as possible,” says Fleury. “I wanted to build something that was a close replica, and I felt a social sense of responsibility to not let what was here for nearly three hundred years be desecrated,” says Fleury.
The original timbers that served as the home’s foundation, the metal locks from the doors, milkstone glass from the lighting, original bricks, and other architectural details were salvaged and incorporated into the plans drawn by Batson. While the footprint remained the same as the original structure, Batson reimagined the former home by stretching the rooms both horizontally and vertically, instantly modernizing the interiors. New, larger windows flooded natural sunlight into formerly dark spaces while hard goods such as the kitchen counters in a Vermont quartzite provided an updated aesthetic.
The interior design needed just as much attention as the architectural plans, and Fleury called upon designer Liz Carroll to bring his vision to fruition. “Mark builds an amazingly detailed house that is thoughtful and creative and unique,” says Carroll, who was tasked with creating an aesthetic that both honored the home’s early eighteenth-century history and kept it fresh and comfortable. Carroll looked to a modernized color palette of “vibrant blues, emerald greens, and golds, which tied to the history of the house,” she says. “That was really a jumping-off point for a lot of the furniture selections.” Fleury’s existing antiques coupled with traditional fabrics in fresh, updated patterns elevated each space. “Liz did a great job pulling off that feeling of an old-new house, and she complemented all the things we did architecturally,” says Batson. “She designed with intent all the way through. The furniture, the artwork, the fabric choices—everything complements the architecture.”
Though it took over two years from razing to completion, the home looks as though it’s always been there. The finishing touch to the home’s design: a commissioned oil painting of the original home by North Carolina artist Clyde Edgerton. “I really wanted to commemorate the home in some way, and this impressionist painting was the perfect touch,” says Batson. The painting hangs above the living room mantle, a constant reminder of the rich history of the land and home that once stood here three centuries ago.